How I Built This with Guy Raz - How I Built Resilience: Loren and Lisa Poncia of Stemple Creek Ranch

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

Fourth generation cattle rancher Loren Poncia and his wife Lisa transformed Stemple Creek Ranch into one of the few carbon neutral livestock ranches in the United States, and have since made their ranch carbon positive, sequestering more carbon than they emit. Lisa and Loren spoke with Guy about how consumers are helping drive the sustainable farming movement, and how they doubled down on online retail after many restaurants shut down. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com host. Hey, everyone, welcome to how I built this resilience edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz, and on these episodes, we're hearing from entrepreneurs and business leaders about how they've been building resilience into their businesses during this very challenging talk. time. And today, my conversation with Lauren and Lisa Poncha, owners of Stemple Creek Ranch. Stemple Creek Ranch produces beef, pork, and lamb on more than 1,000 acres in Marin County, California. It's one of the only carbon-neutral livestock ranches in the United States.

Lauren is a fourth-generation rancher, and he and his wife, Lisa, transforms Stemple Creek into an organic, regenerative farm 15 years ago. Today, they sell their grass-fed meat to restaurants and grocery stores across the Bay Area and also directly to consumers across the U.S. So my first question to Lauren was, how do you make such a carbon-intensive product like meat carbon-neutral? Guy, what we try and do is what we call a dance with Mother Nature, so basically replicating Mother Nature and what she did across the Great Plains, you know, hundreds of years ago with massive herds of bison crossing the Great Plains. They were regenerating the soil just naturally. So they would eat the grass in front of them, stomp on the grass below them, and poop on the grass behind them.

That actually regenerated the soil and grew more perennial plants. And really, it's a photosynthesis business. So if we have a living plant in the ground that's capturing sunlight, it's growing and with photosynthesis, pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, storing it in the soil. Are you able to actually measure it? We think of cows, for example, as, you know, creating methane. and that contributes, of course, to carbon pollution, but are you able to actually measure how you're able to sequester that carbon and offset the methane that they release?

We have some really good data. This is the fun part about our businesses. A lot of times people say, oh, this is what we're doing, but we actually have hard data. We started this Marin Carbon project about seven years ago, and we did a study about applying compost and how the compost affects sequestering carbon or not sequestering carbon in our soils,

applied with all of our other management practices, like fencing off the riparian areas, planting trees, diversity in our pastures. And basically what the data seven years later shows is we're sequestering about 1,000 pounds of carbon per acre per year, managing it the way we are, even our control plots. So our other management practices besides applying compost are really helping with sequestering carbon

and having healthy soil as well. From what I understand, I mean, one of the things that releases carbon into the atmosphere is when soil is churned, right? And you aerate it. So what do you do to avoid doing that? We have a pretty intense rotational grazing system or pulse grazing, we call it, where we rotate the cattle around in large herds. And we try and replicate Mother Nature. We're not perfect at it, but we try. And it just promotes perennial plants that are going to make more photosynthesis, which is going to sequester more carbon in the soil. Lauren, we featured you on a segment we did on the show a couple years ago called How You Built That, which unfortunately we had to put it on pause this year because of other things we're doing. And I had a chance to visit your ranch, as you know. And it was amazing to see some of the things that just blew me away.

For example, you plant chicory plants because I guess they have deep roots and they errate the soil and you've got worm farms. So the worms like dig into the soil, things like that. Can you explain that? So basically a lot of people would say, what's your biggest limiting nutrient in a California dryland pasture? And many people would say, oh, it's water because we're dry half the year. But that's not really truly our limiting factor. Our biggest limiting factor is air in the soil. Because without air in the soil, it's like a human with a 300 pound weight on our chest.

So there's three ways to get air in the soil. One is with a plow. And when you're plowing with a tractor, you're actually releasing carbon into the atmosphere. The other one is with roots, roots get down into the soil and break up the soil. And when they die, they leave air in the soil. And the other is with worms. So we're trying to embrace not the plow and embrace the worms and the roots. And so there's diversity in the pasture is real important.

And chickery has a deep tap root. Plantain has a deep tap root. There's some other really awesome natural plants that have deep tap roots that actually help break up the soil. And they're perennial. Yeah, they lived for five, 10 years. And they're super nutritious. The cattle love them and the sheep love them. And they make great coffee.

Right, exactly. Lauren, you are a fourth generation California rancher. And I know that as a kid, you watched your parents struggle to make ends meet while they were raising cattle that they would sell to, you know, larger cattle ranches. And you even vowed never to go into the family business. You were in the veterinary pharmaceuticals for a while. But you did come back. and you and Lisa decided to transform the family farm into an organic grass-fed farm. How did you come to that decision?

And why? You know, I think that really comes down to, guys, you have to be dissatisfied with their current results to create change and try something different. I'm super passionate about raising high-quality food, and we had to figure out a way that we can do this and actually make money and not struggle. So we figured very quickly the way to do that was to be the price-making. instead of the price taker and have a unique product, do what's right for the environment. At the same time, we do what's right for the environment. We're making money on it. We've totally flipped the whole paradigm.

And instead of just being a price taker and doing what everybody else does, we've gone out and changed our market and created our own brand and basically dictate to the market what we need to be able to make a profit and do what's right. And you can command a higher price because it's organic, it's grass fed, and all of these other things. Yeah. That's worked for us so far, and we're really excited about being able to do this and make the improvements on the ranch and supply something that consumers want. Consumers are asking for it. Let's give it to them. I want to talk about what happened in March, right? Because March of 2020 hits, the pandemic, it's clear that it is here. Everything starts to shut down. I mean, your business depends on restaurants, on, you know, grocery store. Were you worried that the bottom was going to fall out? Very. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

It was a very scary time. I mean, for all of us, but it was definitely very tumultuous. What did you expect would happen? I would say our most immediate concern was that our team, our staff, was not going to be able to work. They were going to, or we were going to get sick or we weren't going to be able to physically leave our homes to go to the workplace. Once we started grinding through that and it became clear that we were going to get sick, were considered an essential business and that we could, you know, work. Then the biggest fear became our, our vendors that harvest and process our products for us and cut and wrap them

and essentially get them ready for us to sell. Were they going to be able to stay in business? It was very stressful. It was very complicated. There was a lot involved. But at the end of the day, we were able to keep all of that moving and to really work with our vendors and to help them. and they helped us, and there was many changes that we had to make lots of sleepless nights, but it did work out. I wonder, Lisa, around that time, we had Gary Erickson of Cliff Bar on the show, and he was saying, it's crazy. We can't keep them on the shelves.

Presumably the restaurant side of your business, you sound immediate decline, but did you start to see an uptick and direct-to-consumer orders through your website? We did. So, interestingly enough, just before the pandemic, we were featured on a Netflix TV show called Ugly delicious so about steak. So we were already seeing a decent influx to our online sales because of that. And then COVID hit right in the middle of March. And we definitely saw quite a bit of increased traffic on our website for our direct-to-consumer sales. And you are correct. At the very same time, our restaurant business completely taint. You know, most restaurants at that time just completely

shut their doors. Some were open, you know, at a very limited basis. And so then it became the logistical issue of how do we take all of this product that was processed and, you know, cut and wrapped and ready to sell like in large quantities and pieces to restaurants and food service and somehow re-process that into retail cuts so that we could have them available for the direct-to-consumer sales. Right, because restaurants are buying like an entire, like a huge, right and they're butchering it themselves yeah a whole ribby a 12 pound ribby or 15 pound ribby and we had to cut that down into one pound steaks to be able to sell online right by the way I mean I assume that you can only do what you do on a small scale I mean is that right could you do this at like a factory farm that produces thousands of tons of meat a week like what you do how you raise animals we as a country could raise a lot more grass fed grass finish

beef. If we change the paradigm of what conventional agriculture does in the Midwest, I mean, it's row crops and corn and soy, which are heavily subsidized. If we converted that land back to pasture land, perennial pasture land, we could grow probably enough meat for the entire nation. It is possible. It's gaining steam, and there's more and more people doing this every day, but it's not an overnight snap of the fingers quick fix. Yeah. You know, I, remember when I was a kid, beef was expensive. Like, when we had a steak dinner, it was a big deal. My dad would come home with a T-bone steak from Ralph's and it was a big deal. And now, like, the price of meat is so low. That's a huge part of it. And we talk about this all the time is that

that's part of the paradigm shift. Is that, okay, maybe producing it this way is more expensive, but then maybe you eat less. And there's the true, there's a true cost that's not measured in what you pay for it at the grocery store when you're buying conventional meat. And the true cost is the subsidized feed that goes into it in the environmental or the way that employees are treated, you know, all of those types of things. And the conventional industry is very, very efficient so they can do it cheaply. But they're not necessarily very, very resilient. And that's what we ran into during the COVID times where huge packing plants where people were as close as me and Lisa, you know, making one knife cut. We're getting sick with COVID.

and the packing plants were getting shut down, our small processors were more resilient because they could give each other space and they were, I don't know, it wasn't as efficient. It's not as cheap to do it, but it's more resilient if that makes sense. So, I mean, is there a world where, because I love this idea of eating less meat, eating it mindfully, right? You might pay a little bit more, but you're not going to eat it every day. Because right now, you know, grass-fed organic, sustainable, carbon-neutral meat, like that you make, which is still very rare in the United States, it's expensive compared to a

McDonald's burger for sure. Is there a world where it could be produced and sold at a lower price point, or is that just an impossibility? No, I think we're headed that direction as more and more people learn about it and become efficient and understand how to raise the cattle. I think in 20 years it's going to be very common that you see grass-fed organic meat on the grocery store shelves. That's, you know, a lot more affordable. Even now, it's not unaffordable. When you look at the nutrient density of grass-fed meat compared to all the other things on the grocery store, it's actually relatively cheap when you look at the nutrient density.

It's just, you know, do you need to eat two pounds a day or do you need to eat two ounces a day? We're getting a lot of questions in. So I'm going to go to some of them now. This is from Megan Brunner. via LinkedIn, Megan asks, do you have any predictions to when regenerative agriculture will become mainstream? You know, kind of like how organic and non-GMO have become mainstream. I already see such an influx and so much more interest in it and so many more farmers and ranchers getting really excited about it. So we are absolutely on that road.

I think it's like a tidal wave, you know, the groundswell is building and it's coming. But a lot of it comes back to and not to get political. the different administrations now with the new administration, I think there'll be more focus on regenerative and carbon-type farming practices. It will affect the future of food. Even 10 years ago, we very much felt like we were going against the grain. And a lot of people thought we were a little wacadoodle, which maybe we are. I'm sure we are, especially with our kids at home. But even that has changed. And that's only 10 years. Ten years is not a long time. When we come back in just a moment, more of my conversation with Lauren and Lisa Poncha and how they navigate being partners in life and in business.

Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. Hey, welcome back to how I built this resilience edition. And I'm talking with Lauren and Lisa Poncha. They're the owners of Stemple Creek Ranch in Marin County, California. Lauren and Lisa met in college and neither of them expected to be running a thousand acre family. farm. In fact, Lauren had once vowed never to run the family business. Now they are juggling all of this while raising their family during an extremely challenging year. And obviously, it hasn't been easy. Here's a question from Vivek Sinha. And before I asked this question, I want to preface it by saying, the story of the two of you, because you work together, you run

the business. Your story is also fascinating because I know you both met at college at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Lauren, you were studying veterinary science. And Lisa, say you were intending to become a lawyer. You did become a lawyer. I don't think you had any intentions of ever working as a farmer. You grew up in Los Angeles. And you are a husband and wife team. Vivek asks, how do you as a husband and wife team make it work?

He says his wife and he are in the same profession. And 2020 has made it really challenging to find a work life balance. Amen, Vivek. So we both probably have some comments here. It's very challenging. But I would say what has made it work for us is two things. One, that me and Lauren very much have different skill sets, and we come from very different places. And so we have tried to embrace each other's philosophies and strengths and weaknesses.

And so we have very different sandboxes in our business. Lauren has his sandbox. I try really hard not to disrupt what he's doing in his sandbox. I have my sandbox. Likewise, it doesn't always work, but we try really hard. And, you know, it does make it really challenging to have any sort of definition, you know, between work and life. We really don't. It's just like one whole big thing. But doing this with your life partner definitely makes, it makes success so much sweeter.

Lauren? She said it. You know, stay in your own sandbox whenever there's conflict in our relationship. Because there's no line between business and relationship. It's we're always on. you know, it's, I'm getting into her sandbox usually and I need to stay on my, you know, in my side. But that being said, like our goal is to put systems in place as business owners so that

in five years, we can be luxuries to the business. We don't have to show up every day in order to make this thing run. And Lisa is doing an amazing job steering our ship in that direction. And we have a great staff. And, I mean, the staff is really just blown it up in COVID times. I know that you have a diversified business because it's not just ranching, the lamb and pork and beef, which is your main business, but it's also restaurants that are customers. You've got grocery stores all over the Bay Area. There's direct to consumer. But you also have on the farm an event space, a beautiful event space and conference center, which presumably hasn't been active this year.

But given that you're so diversified, do you think that was the key to kind of keeping you guys in the black? And actually, from what I understand, you had a profitable year. We did. Our ranch and our meat business had a profitable year. I absolutely think that our diversification is what helped us stay afloat this year. At the very beginning, 15 years ago when we were getting into this, we discussed heavily that in order to have sustainable agriculture, it had to be sustainable for our family. And that meant we had to be able to actually make a living. It couldn't be a hobby. So given that agriculture in general is so volatile, and there's so many things, that are outside of our control with Mother Nature and just so many other pieces, I really wanted to be

diversified and have many different enterprises. That's why we have beef and lamb and pork and why we had more than one distribution chain of, you know, grocery stores, restaurants, direct to consumer. And it's also a huge part of why we did fix up the ranch and create this beautiful education barn where we can have farm to table dinners and host weddings and fundraisers and corporate events. It just creates more stability to the whole ecosystem, but it also allows us a venue where we can bring in people to teach them about local agriculture and about us and the other producers in our area and hopefully go home and tell their friends and neighbors. How much can you expand as a business? I mean, if regenerative farming, right, by its nature

means that you can't have hundreds of thousands of cattle like a huge factory farm, where are there opportunities for your business to grow? I specifically remember 10 years ago, we sold all of our production. And I looked at Lisa and like, there's no way we can grow anymore. And she goes, well, because the demand was so high? Yeah. I said, there's no way we can grow anymore. And she said, well, figure out a way you can do it. So what we've done recently is, well, I mean, it's kind of my full-time job, is to find more pasture that we can fix up and work into our system in different regions that have green grass when we don't have green grass. And then we do the dance, like I'm saying, with Mother Nature,

and we harvest animals from a different pasture in July than we do in January. And we work with other like-minded people. So going back to one of your earlier question is like, is the groundswell of regenerative agriculture growing? Yes, because we get people that call us every day and want to work with us. That are ranchers, agricultures, but they don't want to sell direct to consumers. They want to raise the animals. They don't want to talk to people. And I'm like, well, we have that recipe down.

We can both raise and talk to people if you help us raise the cattle our way. And so we're being 100% honest and transparent, but we don't raise all of the animals necessarily on our ranch. Right. But you have a process that you oversee and certain guidelines that they have to follow in order to be Stemple Creek. 100%. Yeah.

There's a question from Carthick via Facebook. Carthick asks, there are a lot of meatless alternatives, right? We've done Ethan Brown, we've done Pat Brown and Possible Foods on the show. Really, you know, interesting person. I mean, Pat Brown has a vision that people will stop eating meat, animal meat because it does contribute to global carbon emissions. A lot of that has to do with deforestation. And so he's trying to create meatless alternatives with impossible meat.

I mean, do you think that meatless alternatives could eventually replace animal meat? I mean, do you think that's a plausible possibility? I think when it comes to true nutrient density, I much prefer cows over chemists. I think that, you know, there's trends in the industry where people want to have like no meat Monday or meatless Monday. And me as a father of two beautiful daughters, I'd rather have no sugar Sunday than no meat Monday because I think sugar is causing way more. dietary issues and health issues for both the planet and for consumers. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of misconceptions about what animal agriculture does for the environment.

Most of these cattle are raised on non-farmable land. It's not like we're putting cattle on the flat land that you can drive a tractor to grow these other things. So we could have a whole show just on this topic guy. I would much rather do what Mother Nature intended in my book. opinion what Mother Nature intended and eat an animal that has grown naturally than I would something that has a patent formulated in a laboratory that's made indoors and processed. To be clear, I eat beyond meat. I eat impossible burgers. I eat your meat too. I mean, I eat all

of them. There are some extremely compelling arguments, obviously, that people like Pat Brown and Ethan Brown and others who are making plant-based meats, you know, would argue and, you know, counter to what you're saying, but we'll leave it at that and say, I understand your point of view. I want to get to another question. This is a very technical question, but I love this question because I think they'll appreciate it. Dan Reed asks this question via Facebook. Do you have any knowledge or experience with nitrogen fixing plants that have deep tap roots? I don't entirely understand the question, but I think you might. Well, that's a great question because we routinely plant those, but there's lots of legumes or nitrogen fixing plants. Basically, they, they're

pull nitrogen from the atmosphere and then they excrete it in nodules in the soil. And nitrogen is what makes the plants grow combined with photosensitive. So it's a soil science ecology question all in one. But the biggest thing, both in life in our human populations and our soil populations and our forage populations and livestock grazing forage is diversity. We want lots of different plants working together and it makes beautiful music when you have lots of different plants, not monocrops of just alfalfa or just soy or just corn. We are starting to see huge meat companies getting into the organic and natural, and they've been doing that for a while.

You know, do you think that's a good thing for the industry that these huge producers of meat are coming in and buying up these small, organic, natural ranches? Or does that concern you? I think it really makes a statement that consumers want this, transparency, honesty, and quality. And the big boys that have the money are trying to fix their brands by buying great reputation companies. And you can't ignore the almighty dollar from the consumer. If they want to hit their numbers, they can't ignore grass-fed organic. I think it's really the consumer's power by voting with their dollars that are driving these decisions. What are your sort of plans

for the post-pandemic era with your business? Where are you looking to focus your energy first when you can. We're talking about that actively right now, but I would say, in my opinion, that the industry just fast forwarded 10 years and the direct to consumer is the future of our business, either online home delivery or us delivering direct to people. And we're going to embrace that a lot. And we're going to embrace lots of farm-to-table dinners and getting people out to the farm and educating them and breaking bread together and drinking good wine because we love that. But I don't know if I missed something. No, that's, you hit it. I mean, it's almost like we're going back to the 50s where you got your dairy products delivered to your door and your eggs delivered to your door.

Now, I mean, we could be going back to that. Absolutely. And it creates amazing connections between the person eating the food at their table and whoever produced the product. And more of that is only a good thing. You know, what's old as new. That's an excerpt for my conversation with Lauren and Lisa Poncha, the owners of Stemple Creek Ranch in Marin County, California. To see our full live interview, you can go to Facebook.com slash How I Built This. And if you want to see all of our past live interviews, you can find them there or at YouTube.com slash NPR.

And don't forget, you can join our live conversations every Thursday at 9 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern. If you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by Liz Metzker with help from Fairfax, Sarah Safari, J.C. Howard, Bruce Grant, El Manion, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Janet Ujung Lee. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR.